Through 12 standards about love’s tricky turns and soft whispers, the sound on Ann Savoy’s latest release is sweet, but rarely sugary, a good album for the deep summer. Tin Pan Alley is comfortable in the Delta, which dreams of Paris.

If anything, we might fault Savoy and company for sticking too closely to the script, a sound too unified, lacking adventure. Yet, the choice of songs is not a scattershot collection of favorites or surface idolatry, certainly not a case of playing it safe. The record is a photo album—the backgrounds different, but the same photographer with a talent for black and white and a very developed sense of lighting and composition.

Beautifully taut in its ascents and descents, Savoy’s voice enjoys a robust romance with Kevin Wimmer’s violin, particularly on “My Funny Valentine.” An unfortunate selection for lesser interpreters, the song works in their version because they take it only a notch away from Chet Baker’s mold while adding dashes of personal inflection. Check out the sounds of Tom Mitchell’s fingers sliding along the neck of the guitar, how they add to the sensual descriptions in the lyrics. That’s called real feeling.

Listen to that next to Bessie Smith’s “Whoa, Tilly, Take Your Time,” and hear how good restraint can sound when accompanied by confidence. Throughout the album, Savoy never overdoes it, blessed with that Cajun familiarity of music’s role in life—for dancing, for laments, for humor. She recreates Django Reinhardt, Blue Lu Barker and Johnny Mercer with musicians who conjure up clouds and past lovers, a sensitive stroll through the canon, willing to smell the flowers.